Apollo seen as model for new craft

Bush expected to seek funding for versatile ship

January 10, 2004|By Eric Pianin, The Washington Post.

In his expected call for Americans to return to the moon and then forge on to Mars, President Bush next week will urge Congress to invest in developing a powerful and versatile spacecraft, modeled on the 1960s-vintage Apollo program, to replace the aging space shuttle fleet.

Bush will seek a 5 percent annual increase in NASA's $15.5 billion budget beginning in fiscal 2005, and he has called for a major reordering of the space agency's spending priorities to fund initiatives that would include establishing a permanent base on the moon, administration officials said.

Much of the money for Bush's space initiatives would come from the gradual elimination of the three remaining shuttles, which cost about $3.5 billion a year to operate and maintain.

The proposed new crew exploration vehicle, or CEV, would be designed to conduct a broad range of missions, including transporting crews to and from the International Space Station, landing on the moon, and, eventually, serving as part of a series of manned missions to Mars, according to an administration official.

It would supplant a proposal under review by NASA officials and congressional leaders to build an orbital space plane to carry crews to and from the space station, which lacks the enormous lifting power of the shuttle fleet.

Details of the president's budget and space initiatives were reported Friday by United Press International and confirmed by administration officials.

The first test flights of a prototype of the CEV could come by 2007.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Science Committee's subcommittee on space and aeronautics, said Friday that the shuttle fleet could be phased out within four to five years, once NASA and its Russian partners complete assembly of the space station.

The United States would then rely on Russian, Japanese and European rockets to get to and from the station until the CEV is operational, space experts said.

The plan Bush is scheduled to announce next week grew out of a White House group assigned to examine NASA's mission after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated last Feb. 1.

The board that investigated the Columbia accident noted in its final report last summer that there hasn't been "a compelling mission requiring human presence in space" since President John F. Kennedy's call in 1961 to send Americans to the moon.

A NASA team of experts last year studied the viability of using the Apollo command and service modules as the basis for a crew-return vehicle to service the space station and concluded that it would be feasible.

The team's March 2003 report noted that the Apollo design had been a "highly successful, rugged and robust system," that re-entry into Earth's atmosphere in the capsule would pose a low risk, and that--unlike the shuttle design--its abort-and-recovery system provided a "very high level of safety for the crew."